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Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Specialist for the IBM System Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
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author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services. You can also follow him on Twitter @az990tony.
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This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. Here is a recap of Day 4 afternoon sessions which related to Cloud computing.

IBM SmartCloud Enterprise -- Object Storage

George Contino, IBM GTS Consultant for Cloud Storage Service Enablement, presented IBM's latest Object Storage offering, based on an alliance IBM formed with Nirvanix last October 2011, launched January 31, 2012. It is part of the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise system.

IBM currently has two datacenters for this now, Secaucus NJ and Frankfurt Germany, but will have five by end of 2012, and hopefully seven datacenters by nid-year 2013.

The storage is then divided in several layers:

Customer master account, assigned a 128-bit encryption key

Name spaces by department or LOB

User sub-accounts

User folders

User file objects

The objects are given random names, with the real customer-assigned file names stored elsewhere, to provide additional privacy through obfuscation. For added security, it uses Two-Factor Authentication, requiring the users to provide both the 128-bit encryption key and the password.

There are three ways to access data:

Proprietary API - An API is available on Windows and Linux. Symantec NetBackup, BackupExec and Commvault Simpana have already coded to the Nirvanix API to allow backups to be stored in the Nirvanix storage cloud. IBM InfoSphere Optim can archive data to the Nirvanix storage cloud.

CloudNAS - Nirvanix provides software that provides CIFS and NFS interfaces, that converts to the Nivranix API. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager can send backups and archives to the Nirvanix storage cloud using this approach.

Cloud Storage Gateway - Third parties have developed hardware that runs the CloudNAS software, or directly codes to the API, to provide standard interfaces to the local clients, and provides access to the Nirvanix storage cloud. Two examples were Panzura File System Controller and Twinstrata Cloud Array Gateway.

One of Nirvanix's partners is OxygenCloud, which allows mobile/laptop access to work files. This includes security checks on Active Directory or LDAP, AES-256 bit encryption and HTTPS protocol support. For example, if you had to give a bunch of PDF files to your clients outside your company, you could create a folder, and send out a URL link to the clients, and this link would be valid for the next 14 days for them to download the files.

How University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) moved SAP to the Cloud

Maik Gasterstaedt, IBM Technical Enablement for SAP, Storage and Cloud solutions, presented this session on the deployment of an SAP cloud at UWM. Worldwide, SAP has established five University Competency Centers (UCC) to provide SAP cloud services to other universities, and UWM is one of these five UCC.

Basically, the UWM manages SAP instances that are then "rented out" to 107 other universities. An SAP instance represents a "sample company" that could be used in a course curriculum, for example, "Global Bikes, Inc.", "Fitter Snacker", or IDES. An SAP Client represents a fresh copy of the data for this sample company.

UWM charges each University per "SAP client" per semester. Suppose a professor will teach three classes on SAP. He can arrange the SAP clients depending on how much he is willing to spend.

Get one SAP Client to be shared across all three classes. All three classes would be using the same sample company.

Get an SAP Client for each class. Each class could be based on the same or different sample companies.

Get one or more SAP Clients for each class. In this case, for example, a class could get two or more sample companies.

The problem was that they were running on Sun servers approaching end-of-life. They decided to switch to IBM, running 43 SAP Instances on AIX with two Power750 servers, 7 SAP instances on Windows guests of VMware across two BladeCenter chassis using HS22 blades, XIV storage, backed up by Tivoli Storage Manager and Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager. They can run 50 SAP clients on each SAP instance. Each client could be rented out to different professors at different universities.

They started installation April 1, and the entire system was running in production by August 15, less than five months end-to-end.

The results were stunning. SAP instance provisioning used to take 5 days, now takes 12 hours. Backups that used to take an hour complets in about 30 seconds.

The conference is almost over folks! Just a few sessions tomorrow and then it is all done.